BORIS JOHNSON: Trump would do a better job of Brexit than Theresa May

BORIS Johnson has attacked Theresa May in a secret recording obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Speaking at the Institute of Directors in London on Wednesday, the Foreign slammed May and said there was a “Method” to Donald Trump’s madness.

“I am increasingly admiring of Donald Trump,” Johnson said. “I have become more and more convinced that there is method in his madness.”

“Imagine Trump doing Brexit,” Johnson said. “He’d go in bloody hard… There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’d gone mad. But actually, you might get somewhere. It’s a very, very good thought.”

He attacked Russia and said: “[Vladimir] Putin feels a deep sense of shame that he’s leader of a country that has been so greatly reduced in its global importance,” Johnson said.

“When I was a kid, Russia really mattered. It’s now got an economy about the size of Australia. Yeah, they’ve they’ve got a lot of nuclear weapons, but it’s real importance in the world is greatly [diminished]. Putin’s a revanchist. He wants to cause trouble. He wants to upset people like us.”

The rest of the world has to be “very firm” in response, Johnson said.

On China he said: “China is a rival. China is a rival, but China is a rival whose growth and whose incredible developing power can be used to our advantage.”

He added: “We need to engage with China diplomatically, treat China as our friend and our partner, but also recognise that they are our commercial rivals. And they will try to stiff us.”

On disarming North Korea, Johnson said: “Of course we’ve got to help the Americans do this thing…. I just talked to Mike Pompeo, my counterpart in the US State Department. What they want us to do is to use our nuclear expertise to dismantle Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear missile. That’s what he asked me to do today.”

Johnson said he “would love to” visit North Korea, and believes the UK has influence there. But he said he has no immediate plans to visit.

Speaking about Brexit, Johnson told the Tory activists the talks are approaching a “moment of truth”.

“I’m not going to hide it from you,” Johnson told the activists. “There is an argument going on.”

Brexit will happen, “and I think it will be irreversible,” Johnson said. But he added: “The risk is that it will not be the one we want.”

Johnson told members of Conservative Way Forward that he’d spoken earlier that day to Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, about the situation in North Korea.